With Fifth Edition now officially released, we wanted to provide you with some information to help you prepare for the upgrade. Attached is a document with some critical Fifth Edition Upgrade & Training Considerations.
We are offering services to help with the upgrade of our software as well as What’s New in Fifth Edition training. On Tuesday, May 27, 2008, you will receive all of the information necessary for the upgrade via a Newforma transmittal.
We are focused on providing you with a total solution that makes the upgrade and use of Newforma Project Center as easy as possible. If you have suggestions or comments please do not hesitate to reach out to any of us as our goal is your satisfaction.
Thank you,
Dan, Renee, and Steve
Fifth Edition Upgrade Considerations.pdf
In the AECbytes of March 27, 2007, Gould Evans Associates Project Team Leader Tamara Shroll shows how her Phoenix office uses Newforma Project Center to create animated GIFs that show before-and-after drawings for building redesigns. Newforma developed the functionality as part of a quality control process for revised sets of drawings. It shows what’s moved, what’s new and what has stayed the same. Tamara saw that these animated GIFs could show clients how spaces will be transformed, so she embeds animations in slide presentations to stakeholders. You can see an example - and how-to instructions - at Tamara’s tech tip at AECbytes:
http://www.aecbytes.com/tipsandtricks/2007/issue16-newforma.html
Tamara’s ingenuity is a great example of gaining even more value from software than it was originally designed to deliver.
Did you know that many Newforma Project Center training sessions qualify for continuing education units (CEUs) through the American Institute of Architects? One hour of training generates one learning unit, or LU. Newforma offers training in the basics of Newforma Project Center for those who may have recently implemented the solution, and Professional training for those looking for more advanced applications such as those found in the Project Timeline, Submittals, Transmittals and RFI management activity centers of Newforma Project Center.
After your completed training, send an email to which includes the date of the training, the location of the training (city, state), the class that was provided, and the AIA member names and numbers, and we’ll verify class completion and get your session submitted. Below you will find a few of the available trainings, along with learning objectives (LO). For additional information on Newforma services, please email .
NPCE90, 1.5 LU
Project Information Management – Express training for the AEC industry
Using Newforma Project Center to remove time- and money-draining inefficiencies from project execution
LO#1: Participants will learn how to organize, manage and search internal project information, including project email and attachments, for all projects.
LO#2: Participants will learn how to electronically review, mark up, and comment on sets of project drawings while providing an audit trail of the decisions in a design review.
LO#3: Participants will learn how to share and track published project information with external team members.
NPCP90, 1.5 LU
Project Information Management – Professional training for the AEC industry
Using Newforma Project Center to successfully track the status of all outstanding project action items and other project activities
LO#1: Participants will learn how to create and manage project action items, as well as use the Project Timeline activity center to create and log project events, milestones and phases.
LO#2: Participants will learn how to use record copies and document sets to manage a project’s key deliverables.
LO#3: Participants will learn how to capture and record markup sessions for a history of the design review process, as well as learn how to compare document versions.
NPCA60, 1 LU
Project Information Management – Contract Administration for the AEC industry
Using Newforma Project Center to save time and paper by managing the CA phase electronically
LO#1: Participants will learn how to process and manage requests for information (RFIs).
LO#2: Participants will learn how to track the status of all submittals, and generate appropriate reports.
LO#3: Participants will learn how to support external team members with web-based access to transmittals, submittals and RFIs.
Newforma Fifth Edition requires that the Info Exchange Server and Project Center Server be on the exact same version to communicate and function. The requirements are slightly less restrictive with the Newforma client (but all versions of the client at a site should be on the same version even if they do not match the server version.
These requirements frequently lead to a couple of questions:
- How do I determine what version my servers and clients are currently running?
- What version of the software represents which release of the software (i.e. initial release, HotFix1, HotFix2)?
To answer question 2, the following builds map to the following releases:
- Fifth Edition initial release – 5.0.2239
- Fifth Edition HotFix1 – 5.0.2373
- Fifth Edition HotFix2 – 5.0.2562
Client Version
To determine what release a given client is running, select the drill down next to the help button in the upper right-hand corner of Newforma, then select About Newforma Project Center…”. The about dialog box provides the Product Version of the client installed on the machine.
Select this link for an example image of determining Client Version: ClientVersion.gif
Info Exchange Version
To determine the version of Newforma Info Exchange running on your Info Exchange Server, log onto your Info Exchange Server box and navigate to the location in which Info Exchange is installed. By default this location is \Newforma Info Exchange\Fifth Edition. Right-mouse-click on the n4.exe file and select properties. On the Version tab, the version of Newforma Info Exchange can be determined.
Select this link for an example image of determining Info Exchange Version: InfoExchangeVersion.gif
Project Center Server Version
To determine the version of Newforma Project Center Server running on your Project Center Servers, log onto your Project Center Server box and navigate to the location in which Project Center Server is installed. By default this location is \Program Files\Newforma\Fifth Edition\Newforma Project Center Server. Right-mouse-click on the ProjectCenterServer.exe file and select properties. On the Version tab, the version of Newforma Project Center Server can be determined.
Select this link for an example image of determining Project Center Server Version: ProjectCenterServerVersion.gif
Newforma has noted some recent issues with Riverbed of which we wanted to make this forum aware. There is a new CIFS (Common Internet File System) overlapping files optimization in Riverbed 5.0 that results in access-denied errors when two Newforma apps, Newforma Project Center Server and/or Newforma Project Center (client), try to access the same project from different offices.
The specific user experience is slowdowns in the UI. After the client gives up, an error message is frequently displayed around being unable to open a file such as “b2cfd59e-fd66-102b-8d99-4ac5fca23626.npm”.
Disabling this optimization allows all applications to continue working properly. The attached image provides guidance on exactly where the “Overlapping Open Optimization” is managed.
Newforma Director of Customer Satisfaction Dan Conery tells how to serve Chilean sea bass, describes how firms are moving toward integrated project delivery, and explains why a contractor was happy to bid on a high school designed without lockers.
First off, where did you eat?
I had the best pan seared Chilean sea bass at Rabia’s in the North End. It’s all about how you present the fish: It was on a bed of spinach linguini instead of putting the stuff on top, as other places do.
That sounds healthy, for some reason.
Yeah, well, then we went to Mike’s Pastry for a cannoli with milk chocolate M&Ms on the end. I like to follow a balanced diet.
What are people talking about in Boston?
People right now are trying to figure out how to get ROI on BIM. Today, if they’re using BIM, it’s just to design the building, not to build the building. They’re not using BIM to involve builders earlier in the process, or to resolve conflicts.
What difference does it make whether they involve builders early in the process, or later, using requests for information?
Maybe one factor is that an RFI may lead to a redesign, which may mean more money for the builder. I heard of a high school accidentally designed without lockers. The contractor bid the job without lockers, which helped him to be the low bid. Then he made money after the fact by adding lockers into the plan.
It seems that whether the contractor formally asks for input via an RFI or informally gives input to the model, they’re doing the same thing, only at a different phase of the project.
The key is to record the decision-making process whenever it happens. Document decisions. Trust but verify. Architects and engineers tell me their project nirvana is an environment of trust, and good documentation helps verify that trust is not misplaced.
Is the documentation used to point fingers, or what?
Ideally, the reason for documenting is to understand the reasons leading to a decision, as opposed to avoiding or assigning blame. But the current motivation is CYA.
What’s the difference between integrated practice and integrated project delivery?
First, people want to get the pieces of their own companies working together. That’s the integrated practice side of the equation. If you’re a multi-disciplinary firm, how to you get your A side talking to your E side better? After you get that down, you start working with external partners. How do you get your submittal and RFI processes more efficient? That’s the integrated project delivery side.
Is progress toward IPD a software issue, a cultural issue, or both?
BIM and IPD demand fundamental philosophical shifts in how people think about projects. Different legal constructs. Software won’t drive that change. If you can establish the culture, we can help support it. If you are at the point where you want to develop integrated projects, we can help.
As the result of our ongoing customer support follow-up, we have identified three issues that we believe warrant a HotFix release. The key defects addressed by this HotFix are:
- Duplicate Email Handling – In certain circumstances, Outlook’s handling of message formatting prevents Newforma Project Center from properly identifying all duplicate filed copies of an email message. This can result in duplicate copies of messages being retained in project files. Our detection and handling of duplicate emails in this case and in the case of filing via Drag and Drop have been improved in this HotFix. Addressing this defect requires updating both servers and the client application.
Note: Due to the fact that Newforma has improved/changed the way that duplicate emails are detected, if the same email is filed both before and after the Hotfix is applied, it may not be de-duped. For this reason, it is required that when you choose to update ONE client, you MUST update them all or duplicate emails will be created.
- International Content in Project Email Messages – Prior to this HotFix, filed email messages that contain non-Western language alphabets may lose some content in the process of being filed. This problem has been addressed in this HotFix by storing all filed messages in Unicode format. Addressing this defect requires updating both servers and the client application.
- Searchable PDF Content Not Being Indexed – This defect refers solely to hybrid PDFs containing searchable content created via OCR of scanned documents. This defect was a regression, introduced in the original release of Fifth Edition, and results in Searchable PDFs, that have been created or updated since the installation of Fifth Edition, not being properly indexed. This defect has been addressed by this HotFix.
Note: you must rebuild the Newforma Project Center search index if you want to assure that all Searchable PDF content is included in Project Search results. This defect can be addressed by updating the servers only.
If these issues have been reported as a concern by your users, you will want to install this HotFix. If you have not already installed HotFix 1, installing this HotFix will address all defects fixed in both HotFixes. The items addressed in Hotfix 1 are as follows:
- Prevent or reduce the impact of network time synchronization errors on replication of data between the Newforma Project Center and Newforma Info Exchange Servers. This defect can be addressed by updating the servers only.
- Allow commas in the names of projects and project folders. Addressing this defect requires updating both servers and the client application.
- Reduce or eliminate spurious email notifications of failure of the project email service. This defect can be addressed by updating the servers only.
- Correct an issue where Include / Exclude filters on document set folders do not properly apply wildcard characters. Addressing this defect requires updating both servers and the client application.
- Prevent an application crash associated with very long names used for the transmittal / file transfer subject and record copy folder location. Addressing this defect requires updating both servers and the client application.
Note that the server must be updated with this HotFix before you can update the client application. You may choose to update only the servers (Newforma Project Center and Newforma Info Exchange Servers) as indicated above to address the Searchable PDF defect. Addressing many of the other defects involves updating the servers and the client application. You cannot update the client application only. It is our strong recommendation that the server and all clients be updated with this HotFix.
Additionally, one recently reported defect has not been addressed in this HotFix that we want to call to your attention. Automated (Server-Side) Filing of Email from the “Newforma – Items to File” folder in Outlook does not work in a Hosted (outsourced) Microsoft Exchange Server environment. The workaround is to continue using the “File Items” button in the Newforma Project Center toolbar to sweep email that has been dragged and dropped into the “Newforma - Items to File” folders onto the central file server, just as you did in Fourth Edition. This is due to important differences in how authentication works in a Hosted Exchange Server environment and is likely to be a continuing limitation for customers who have outsourced their Microsoft Exchange Server.
As always if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to post a topic on the Newformant user community website, email us at , or contact your Newforma Account Manager.
Regards,
Newforma Support & Services
In our ongoing effort to continuously improve our products, Newforma has developed an update of Newforma Project Center® Fifth Edition that addresses a number of defects that have been reported since commercial release of the product in May, 2008. Most of these defects are very obscure and only affect a very limited number of customers, but a few will be of interest to all Newforma Project Center customers.
The defect fixes included in this update that may be of broad interest include fixes to:
• Prevent or reduce the impact of network time synchronization errors on replication of data between the Newforma Project Center and Newforma Info Exchange Servers
• Allow commas in the names of projects and project folders
• Reduce or eliminate spurious email notifications of failure of the project email service
• Correct an issue where Include / Exclude filters on document set folders do not properly apply wildcard characters
• Prevent an application crash associated with very long names use
If you are experiencing any of the issues listed above, you may choose to deploy this Hotfix.
To gain access to the Hotfix1 transmittal on the Newforma Info Exchange site, please make a request to . We’ll provide you access ASAP to the executables and documentation to allow you to take advantage of these improvements. If you would like Newforma’s assistance in deploying the Hotfix for you, please contact with a request to update your system
Notes:
1. All servers deployed after August 5, 2008 were deployed with the Hotfix1 executables.
2. Although the term “Hotfix” is used, a full uninstall and reinstall of the Project Center Server(s) and Info Exchange Server(s) is required. In our experience each server can be uninstalled and reinstalled in under 15 minutes.
3. It is strongly recommended that the clients be updated to the Hotfix build as soon as possible after the servers are updated. Clients can be installed over existing clients (no uninstall is required).
4. Projects do not require any attention during the update process.
5. The search index is not affected by the update.
6. There is currently no schedule in place for any “Hotfix2” to be released during the Fifth Edition release cycle.
Did you know that there are five (5) ways to file your email through Newforma? All of them utilize Newforma’s email de-duplication code, but each has a potentially different use-case.
- Drag and drop into “Newforma – Items to File” (Autofile)
- Drag and drop into “Newforma – Items to File” (Manual)
- File in Project
- File as
- Drag and drop from outlook directly into a Newforma “Project Email”
Emails can be dragged and dropped into any number of “Newforma – Items to file” sub-folders. A sub-folder is created for each project identified in each users “My Projects” list. Selecting the “File Items” option from the Newforma plug-in in Outlook populates the list of project sub-folders but does not file the emails if the “Automatically File Items” check-box is selected.
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If the option to Autofile these mails is selected, mails in these folders will periodically be filed into that project’s default email folder. Emails are automatically moved to the Deleted Items folder using this method. If you would like the emails to be filed to a specific folder after filing use the Drag and drop into “Newforma – Items to File” (Manual) method (see below).
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Use-case: This method of filing project email provides the ease of dragging emails to file without the additional manual step of selecting “File Items”. This method can also be used for filing emails when you are away from the office and accessing your mail via a web-mail interface or even from a smart-phone.
Some people like to control exactly when the email gets filed or prefer their filed emails to be moved to a folder other than the “Deleted Item” folder. The Drag and drop into “Newforma – Items to file” can still be utilized with the “Automatically file Items” option unchecked.
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Using this method, the emails are only filed from the project sub-folders when the “File Items” option is selected from the toolbar.
Use-case: This method can be leveraged by users who want to more closely control exactly when the emails are to be filed into a project, but enjoy the convenience of the “Newforma – Items to File” project sub-folders.
The method which provides the most flexibility in terms of where the email is filed (and into what object) is to select one or more emails to be file and then select “File in Project” from the Newforma toolbar in Outlook.
Use-case: This method allows you to select the project into which the emails are to be filed, as well as the location (“Default” or “Another project location”). If “Another project location” is selected, a different folder or object can be selected into which the email will be filed. Objects like Action Items, Submittals and RFIs can be selected.
If a new Newforma object like an Action Item or RFI, etc. needs to be created from a single email, that email can be selected and the “File as” option selected. Newforma will prompt you for a project in which this new object is to be created and then begins the creation of that item with the email attached. You should also use this option to file previously tagged items to create a Submittal Reviewer Response and RFI Answer.
Use-case: Use this method to file an email to create Newforma objects.
One of the simplest ways to move a large number of project related email into a project is to have that project open in Newforma and the Project Email activity center selected. By selecting one or more (perhaps many more) emails in Outlook and dragging and dropping them into the Project Email activity center, the mails are de-duped and filed into the projects default email folder. When filed this way, the emails are NOT deleted or moved in Outlook.
Use-case: This method has been designed to allow for a large number of emails (perhaps from public folders) to be filed into a project quickly and easily.
NOTE: There is a known limitation with this method - when selecting a group of mails from Outlook to be dragged and dropped into the Newforma Project Email activity center, make sure the mails are from the same month (or quarter or year, depending on how the emails will be separated by sub-folder in the project - see image below). Filing emails via this method will force ALL of the emails to be filed into one sub-folder under the default project email folder. If mails from multiple months are selected for filing with this method there is a small chance that one of those mails could be filed again by a user and it could end-up in a different folder which prevents Newforma from being able to identify it as a duplicate and eliminate it.
For more information on the method and benefits of Project Email, the following resources can be used:
- On-line Help – Project Email Overview
- Take 5s – Project Email
- Flash Overviews – Email Management
Newforma’s support team has identified an occurrence happening at some of our customer sites. There is a requirement that the MySQL and Newforma data on the Newforma Project Center Server be excluded from back-ups and anti-virus documented in installation guide, a portion of which reads:
Excluding Newforma and MySQL Data from Backups and Virus Scans
Microsoft has identified in article # 209304 that backing up catalog files created by the Microsoft Indexing Service is a common cause for catalog corruption. This happens when you run a backup or virus scan against the directory containing the catalog files while the Index Server is running. Because the Index Server keeps many of the files in that directory open and mapped into memory, a backup process can potentially corrupt them as it may lock them in order to back them up. To work around this, either stop the Index Server (CISVC) or simply remove that directory from the list of directories you back up.
Similarly, the MySQL database should be excluded from backup and antivirus scanning as corruptions and/or service shutdowns can occur.
If the MySQL database is not excluded from scanning, the scan may lock the database preventing the MySQL service from accessing it and causing the MySQL service to shut down. Once the MySQL service is stopped, the Newforma Project Center Server service will shut-down as well as it relies on the MySQL service to store and update data.
Attempts to restart the Newforma Service (without first restarting the MySQL service – an easy step to overlook) will fail and the following error can be returned:
“Newforma Project Center Server shut down due to an invalid database.”
When this occurs, it is most likely that the MySQL service has shut down due to the fact that its database is (or was) locked. Check to see if the MySQL service is running and start it if it is not. Once the MySQL service is running, the Newforma Project Center Server service should be able to started again.
Backup routines such as VERITAS Backup Exec may lock one of the database files, causing the instability for the database server application.
It is recommended to exclude from the backup and antivirus scans the following directories from the root drive on which MySQL and Newforma Project Center Server were installed:
\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\data (for the MySQL database)
and
\Newforma (for the Indexing database)
and
C:\WINDOWS\temp (this is where MySQL generates temp files used to fulfill certain queries) - Specifically, the “.MYI” extension needs to be excluded from scanning in the temp directory.
For suggestions on backing up your databases, take a look at the Restore the Project Center Server topic in the Newforma Help system.
Newforma Take 5 video tutorials demonstrate real-time solutions to everyday questions. Each tutorial takes about five minutes to introduce you to a specific function of Newforma Project Center software.
Note: Take 5 videos require the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. Firefox users can view videos by installing this add-in.
General Navigation & User Interface
Explore the interface in Newforma Project Center Fifth Edition.
Project Email
Learn how to file project-related email from Outlook and then use Project Center to locate and search for project email.
Project Search
Watch how search will save you time by instantly locating search terms in project email as well as CAD, PDF, MS-Office and other popular file formats.
View & Markup
Learn how to use the View and Markup functions of Newforma Viewer and Newforma Project Center.
Markup Sessions
Learn how to review, redline and collaborate using Newforma Project Center Markup Sessions.
Newforma Info Exchange
If you’ve received an Info Exchange account notification, these videos show how to login and send and receive file transfers at the Info Exchange website. You’ll also see how to view reports of transfers you’ve sent and received
New Info Exchange User Login
Learn how to login to Newforma Info Exchange as a new user.
For recipients of Newforma Info Exchange file transfers
Learn how to receive a file through Newforma Info Exchange.
Want to see more?
Newforma customers may access Take 5 videos on Transmittals, Submittals, Issue Manager, Markup and more via Take 5 activity centers, or via the Help icon in the upper right corner of any Newforma Project Center screen. Click Help > Home > More Resources > Video Tutorials.
In his travels across the United States talking to customers and seeking sustenance, Newforma Director of Customer Satisfaction Dan Conery resolves the debate about carbohydrates versus proteins, explains why information needs to be everywhere at once, and gives hope to those caught in the valley of despair.
You recently visited Newforma customers in Kansas City, Missouri, famous for its barbecue. Is that what you ate?
Before the barbecue, I tried Pasta Tasting Trio at Lidia’s (Lidia’s Kansas City). Then I had pork ribs and burnt ends at Jack Stack’s (Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue).
Couldn’t decide between carbohydrates and protein, huh?
Actually, I did decide. I decided to have carbohydrates in one meal and protein in the other.
A true diplomat.
Lidia’s solves the problem of deciding what to order by serving three different pasta dishes at one serving. You’re welcome to ask for second helpings, but even I have trouble ordering seconds at Lidia’s. But in the barbecue department, I should add that Arthur Bryant’s gets an honorable mention, and Oklahoma Joe’s is on the list of places to eat in Kansas City.
When you were not occupied with sustenance, what was the buzz in Kansas City?
There was a lot of enthusiasm around upgrading to Newforma Project Center Fifth Edition. I talked to one project manager who loves it because it has this new RFI activity center to manage requests for information. Everyone who’s used Fifth Edition to manage RFIs gives that functionality a huge thumbs up, especially if they were trying to use other parts of Newforma Project Center for RFIs prior to Fifth Edition. To put it diplomatically, there was pent up demand.
Why would RFIs generate any more excitement than, say, the Submittals activity center?
We think it may be because submittals have a physical presence, and aren’t as readily perceived as being electronically manageable, whereas no one disputes that RFIs can be managed entirely electronically.
I hear Deltek integration is another reason uptake is strong. When you create a project in Deltek® Vision®, it automatically creates those projects in Newforma Project Center.
I thought people liked the fact that it saves work, but it’s not about saving work. It’s about having those projects show up in Newforma Project Center at the same time they show up in Deltek. People need to start working on those projects right away, and to do that, those projects need to show up in each software program at the same time.
Architects and engineers are dealing with lots of new technology initiatives these days, what with Vision and Revit and others. How does Newforma fit that mix?
Everyone’s dealing with what the industry calls “the valley of despair” – the period right after the introduction of a new technology when productivity actually dips before rising, as users are learning the new software. Newforma’s valley of despair is tiny compared to other enterprise applications, so our IT champions often deploy Newforma Project Center in order to notch a quick win.
IT people as heroes: Is it possible?
To be deployed and in use within days is rare for software in this industry, yet several of our customers have made that happen. It’s true, I’ve heard more than one user say he’d rather continue with old email habits, but, for the most part, the slight modifications in behavior are overshadowed by the benefits. It’s a complete reversal of conventional wisdom, which says new software brings complaints.
Speaking of something to complain about, what’s the take on the economy from the customers you have spoken with?
Well, I’m working from microscopic sample sizes, so that’s really a question to discuss at newformant.com, where lots of people can chip in with answers. But what I’ve seen is, firms that specialize in domestic-only business such as retail development are suffering, but firms that design healthcare facilities or work outside the United States are growing. One customer told me their firm is prospering despite having a U.S. office that had shrunk 30 percent through attrition. The money’s being made by the firm’s U.K. office, which has doubled in size and is twice as profitable as U.S. operations. Newforma licenses are already growing outside the US. For me, I can’t wait to sample the blood pudding in England!
I was recently asked the question, “When a Newforma Project Center user sends out an email or a notification email as a result of an action such as an Action Item, a Transmittal or an Info Exchange File Transfer, can it also send a delivery or read receipt similar to the functionality of Outlook? “
The answer is, yes. Read receipts are supported when a user is sending an email from Newforma Project Center. Newforma Project Center supports all Outlook functionality for any emails sent by a user through Newforma Project Center. Examples include transmittals, submittals and RFIs sent through email, Send Change Notifications emails for Action Items or any adhoc email sent from Newforma Project Center. Email that are generated through the Newforma Project Center Server would not support receipts for notifications generated by the server, however the history tracking of downloaded files provides a similar level of feedback.
In order for the request for receipt and delivery notifications to function, the setting needs be enabled in Outlook for all messages. This is set through the options in the tools menu as show below.
Again, important to note, this being a function of Outlook, with this enabled, all emails generated in Outlook and through Newforma Project Center will provide a delivery receipt and request a read receipt.
We are often asked about support for Adobe InDesign files in Newforma Project Center. Of course, if you double-click on an InDesign (.INDD) document file in Project Files or any other activity center in Newforma Project Center, you can view the document in InDesign if the application is loaded on your system. However, the Newforma Viewer does not support the .INDD file format for viewing or markup, and Newforma Project Center cannot index or search the .INDD file format. The latter limitation is due to the fact that there is, to our knowledge, no iFilter available for the .INDD file format. However, with a few tips and a simple adjustment to your work process, you can very effectively manage content created with InDesign in Newforma Project Center:
First, if you want to view an InDesign file, you probably should use InDesign (or InCopy) to ensure visual fidelity due to the graphical nature and complexity of layout that is common in most InDesign documents.
Second, get in the habit of saving your InDesign documents as PDFs as a integral part of your work process. Some people object to having to separately create the PDF file, but InDesign does make that incredibly easy, and there are many benefits to doing so:
• The resulting PDF can be indexed and is searchable via Newforma Project Search.
• You can distribute the resulting PDF to other team members who may not have InDesign, yet they can easily mark up the resulting document using the Newforma Viewer and send their review comments back to you as a marked-up PDF.
• The resulting PDFs are more portable than InDesign files; for example, InDesign files do not embed the fonts, so if you are using any non-standard fonts, the recipient of an InDesign file may not see exactly what you saw in composing the page. On the other hand, font definitions are embedded in the PDF generated by InDesign.
Third, always place the InDesign document filename in some standard, inconspicuous location in your InDesign documents, typically in the footer of the last page. If you just can’t put the filename in the footer, at least adopt a filenaming convention for the PDFs you generate in the preceding tip. For example, giving the PDF the same name as the InDesign file, would enable you to search for a document using Newforma Projecct Search, which would find the PDF, and based on either the InDesign filename in the footer or the file naming convention for the PDF, you could easily locate the corresponding InDesign file.
A final tip, if you work with people who routinely send you InDesign files, but you don’t have the application, you might want to purchase a license of Adobe InCopy in order to view InDesign files and convert them to PDF file format. Although InCopy was designed primarily as part of the InDesign workflow, it functions quite nicely on its own as a tool to view and convert InDesign files to PDF. InCopy sells for $249 vs. InDesign for $699.
Can you believe it? Ants are in the news again. And once again, if you’ll pardon the expression, it’s relevant!
Clear Point Consultants of Manchester, Massachusetts, worked ants into a recent newsletter article on best practices for managing remote teams.
“Did you know that ants have an instinctive lock on remote teamwork?” the article begins. “They’ve perfected the use of natural chemical messengers called pheromones to communicate over long distances. Without even trying, these tiny insects have mastered one of the most evolved forms of dispersed group communication on the planet.
“Okay, so you may not be interested in the finer points of bioteaming, and pheromones are definitely not going to replace your Blackberry as your communication method of choice. But if a little ant can be an effective remote team manager, so can you.”
Because Newforma Project Center facilitates remote work processes, we thought it might be a service to link to the article here:
http://templates.haleymail.com/haley_templates/index.smpl?sid=21168&aid=518&art=5798&database=company&user=1392411&d_id=10834515
or
http://tinyurl.com/5njvqq
If you manage remote teams, it may be worth a few minutes to check your practices against those summarized in the article. For example, are you doing things to build trust? And do you meet the criteria for being the right person for the job in the first place?
(Newforma Marketing thanks Marge Hart for pointing us to this link!)
Looking for a way to quickly save any file to a standardized project location on your Network? Let Newforma help! With Newforma’s integration into the standard windows save dialog, you can easily and quickly save any file from any program to a project directory without having to navigate through the maze of folders on the network. To accomplish this simply:
1) Save from any windows application
2) From the left navigation bar in the save as dialog click on the My Computer icon followed by a double click on the My Newforma Projects icon.
You are immediately viewing your My Projects folder list and are able to select the necessary project to save into.
3) Double click the applicable project folder and you are immediately in the project directory.
4) Select the directory you would like to save into, click the save button, and that’s it!
So regardless of what application you are saving from, your project directories are always just a few quick clicks away.
Tip:
When you are saving a file in any Microsoft Office application you can click directly to your project folder list in lieu of going through the My Computer dialog.
Creating New Files Directly From Newforma Project Center
Another possibility to streamline the process of saving your information is by creating the new file from directly inside of Newforma Project Center. To do this you need to:
1) Navigate to the Project Files Activity Center.
2) Select the directory you would like to create the new file in.
3) Once In the correct project directory, right click, select new, and what type of file you would like to create.
Voila, a new file is created in the correct project directory right from Newforma Project Center.
So whether you are saving a file through a windows application or creating a new file from the correct directory inside of Project Center, Newforma can help you streamline your workflow of saving any project information consistently to the correct project directory.
The pictures tell you how to get a new password and change it to something you’ll remember.
Surely you’ve seen it: a series of simple line drawings showing a children’s swing hanging from a tree branch. The drawings show the swing in different forms, perhaps with two seats, another time with three ropes, with captions describing them - “as proposed,” “as specified,” “as designed” and more. Here’s one example.
Search on the web and you’ll find people saying this cartoon harks back to a magazine article in the 1970s, although opinions vary - of course - as to who drew it and where it appeared. Whatever its provenance, now a website has appeared that makes everyone a prospective cartoonist.
http://www.projectcartoon.com/
At ProjectCartoon.com, you can suggest new panels, write your own captions and save the result to amuse your coworkers and rankle your managers.
Here’s hoping we’re all engaged in delivering what the customer wants, as opposed to the variations on view at ProjectCartoon.com!
Newforma has made some significant efforts for Fifth Edition to make deploying Newforma Project Center (client) to your user’s desktop via Active Directory as simple and robust as possible.
The method that has been used in the past has changed and we do not recommend you extract an .MSI from the “NewformaProjectCenterSetup.exe”, as the pre-requisites (Visual Studio Tools, Primary Interoperability Assemblies, and Visual C++ components) which are part of the .EXE, are not bundled as part of the .MSI and would need to be deployed separately, significantly complicating the deployment process.
Rather, we are recommending that the .EXE remain intact and placed on a network share to be called by a .BAT file which is pushed by the Active Directory process to your user’s machines and set to run on start-up.
The details of this process are fully documented in the following files which are included in the Installation and Upgrade deployment transmittals:
New Deployments
\2. Deployment-Installation Files\Newforma Project Center Fifth Edition Installation.doc
Upgrade Deployments
\2. Deployment-Installation Files\Newforma Project Center Fifth Edition Upgrade.doc
If you are considering push deploy methods or have had difficulty with deploying .MSI files using Active Directory in the past, this document is worth a look.
As always, if you have questions, feel free to contact Newforma Support.
Read “Two Steps Forward, No Going Back” at AECbytes
http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2008/issue_38.html
Four years ago, the architecture and planning firm Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas + Company created a strategic technology committee to see what leading firms were doing to improve project delivery. The committee’s formation arose from feeling a high degree of frustration. The people of Hanbury Evans felt that the technology they had, from CAD to communications, was inefficient at a time when clients were demanding more in less time. In this AEC bytes Viewpoint article, Design Principal Stephen C. Wright, who chaired the firm’s strategic technology committee, reflects on the changes that have restored the firm’s operational excellence.
Two Steps Forward, No Going Back: How Our Firm is Using Technology to Gain a Strategic Advantage
AECbytes Viewpoint #38 (May 8, 2008)
http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2008/issue_38.html
PowerPoint overview of the new release of Newforma Project Center.
Here’s the file: Fifth Edition Highlights
Visit this page to download a 75-minute webinar on this material.
Do you ever get the feeling while working on a specific project activity that someone else at your firm (or perhaps even you yourself!) has previously researched, created, designed or completed the exact same task on some other active, completed or archived project?
And how much time do you think is wasted re-creating information that already exists in an email, CAD drawing, specification, spreadsheets, cut sheet or presentation in another project somewhere at your company?
The answers we typically hear are somewhere between “Frequently” and “Almost every task” for the first question and 10 to 20% of my time for the second question.
It begs the question: Wouldn’t it be useful if you could search across every project your firm has ever completed and quickly filter through the results to retrieve the information you need, instead of having to re-create the information?
This article will provide some guidance on how to set up Newforma as an enterprise project search tool to do just that. But first, just to whet your appetite, I would like to walk through an example of how your firm might make use of such a tool.
Using Newforma as a “technical project knowledge system”
In this example, you have received a contractor’s RFI via email:
The contractor needs to know if the temporary use of recycled wood in construction qualifies towards the project’s green building certification. If you didn’t have the answer on your finger tips, you would likely need to track someone else down or go hunting through code books. But the thing is, since your firm does a lot of green projects, it’s highly probable that someone in your office, or perhaps someone in one of the firm’s other offices, has come across this before. And information that you could reuse is probably sitting idle in a file or email somewhere.
In the past you had no hope of finding it, but now since each of the firm’s active, completed and archived projects are in Project Center, you could use search as follows:
1) After typing the search term, select the Search drop down, and click on the Selected Projects… option:
2) Click on Select All or pick selected projects only. Notice you can filter by project status, type or other columns to only search certain kinds of projects:
3) Notice one of the “hits” containing all three words in my search term is a PDF of a fax received from the completely fictional “Green Building Authority”. Without even opening the PDF, I can see the answer in the PDF preview:
4) So I right click and send the PDF or perhaps add it as a supporting document to the RFI so that I can include it in my response:
The hardest part about that workflow was just constructing the search query in a manner that returned a relatively targeted list of relevant matches. If your search term is too generic and you search hundreds of projects constituting terra-bytes of data, it’ll be harder to separate the wheat from the chafe. A search across all the firm’s projects is really an advanced search, so you will want to make use of the advanced search parameters in Newforma, which include many of the standard search options available in other search tools (i.e. wildcards, quotes for phrases, modifiers like -, etc.). Consult Help for details on these options.
Hopefully this article has provided a bit of insight into how you might use Newforma’s multi-project search capabilities to leverage the intellectual property that’s currently inaccessible in your firm’s digital project archives. If you are user of Newforma Search, but not an administrator, you can stop here.
Setting up Newforma to search completed or archived projects
Here are the key steps:
Copy any projects you have backed up on tape or DVD back on to a network drive. Newforma won’t be able to index archived projects unless they are spinning on a networks drive. If you already have some archived projects spinning you can get started with those and add additional projects later.
If your current Newforma Project Center server has capacity for more projects, you could add them to that server. Alternatively, you could deploy another Newforma Project Center Server to support archived projects (i.e. an “Archive Server”). If you don’t have access to an “archive server” and just want to get started, you could add them to your existing Newforma server and use “Batch Re-Pin” at a later date when the archive server is available.
To automate the archive project creation process, use the same Batch Project Creation templates you used to drive the projects you created at your initial deployment. If you use the batch process, be sure to set the project Status field for these projects to “Archive”. You can also use Project Settings to set the project status manually as follows:
The list in the project status drop down is a customizable. Administrators can add or edit entries in this list from within Project Center Administration:
You can enter any value into the Status Label field and use the Status Type field to determine whether the project is active, an opportunity or archived. The Status Type determines which icon is displayed in the interface. Additionally, projects with an Archive status are Read only, meaning users cannot create action items or transmittals, file email, etc.
The Status Label is what displays in the user interface. Notice I have added a label called “Completed”, but left the Status Type as Active. This is because even though the project is completed, I want to leave it open for a time so that the team has time to file any post-mortem emails, incoming transmittals, etc.
After you create these archived projects, I am betting the first thing you will want to do is dump all your archived project email into them! There are several ways to batch file project email. In most cases, the easiest method would be to open the Exchange public folder or PST file containing the archived project email messaged and drag them into the Newforma – Items to File project folder, as shown here:
Naturally, if you create a bunch of new projects and then add tens of thousands of archived emails, the Newforma server is going to be busy for a while and any projects pinned to that server are going to be sluggish. If you don’t have a dedicated archive server, you might want to create archived projects and file emails overnight or over a weekend to minimize the impact on active projects. The good news is that once the archived projects are initially indexed, the server won’t be asked to index them again since they will presumably be read only.
You are probably familiar with the use of “sticky notes” on filed drawings and documents to alert the team of related bits of project information such as RFI’s, sketches, ASI’s and change orders that might be filed elsewhere. Related Items in the Fifth Edition of Newforma Project Center are their digital equivalent. Here is how they work:
Any time you markup a project file or add the project file to a project item as a supporting document, a relationship between the file and its related items is created and maintained by Newforma Project Center. Additionally, when viewing files or other items in virtually any screen, Project Center now indicates the existence of these related items. This really simplifies the information discovery process as you can see these related items in many places, including the Project Files activity center, as demonstrated below:
It’s not hard to imagine how useful related items can be. For example, if I were responsible for issuing an updated version of a drawing, it would be very helpful to instantly find any related markup sessions, RFI, Action Items, milestones or other pieces of project information. In the example below, I can see there are open action items and markup sessions, which I can double click or right click to open and/or act on:
Best of all, most of these relationships are created and maintained as a by-product of using core Project Center capabilities such as Markup Sessions, Action Items, RFI, Submittals, Transmittals and Timeline.
For example, when you use Newforma Markup to create a PDF sketch and send it to a consultant as an action item, the markup session and action item automatically become a related item of the CAD file. There is no additional tagging or grouping required.
Let’s take a look at another powerful way to use related items – the managing and pulling together of an ASI (Architect’s Supplemental Instructions). While Newforma in Fifth Edition does not yet explicitly support the ASI workflow, there are still ample creative ways for teams to use Newforma to manage the ASI process. In the example below, I have created a Milestone on the Project Timeline to manage my ASI. I then added the files to be distributed with the ASI as supporting documents. Notice the supporting document file icons contain little shortcut arrows to indicate they are actually live file links. This is an important characteristic of supporting documents because it allows me to create a working set of ASI deliverables without duplicating or inadvertently creating a different version of these project files.
Also notice that any other project items related to the supporting document can be easily viewed and accessed from this screen shown above. Not only does this provide the team with a single spot to review the current files and activities related to the ASI, but it also leaves behind an organized audit trail for the project record.
I can then use the Event Log view in the Project Timeline to quickly filter project events by the type of event. The screen shot below demonstrates the use of the Event Log to quickly flick through the items related to the project’s meetings and milestones:
And if I need to publish or distribute this information to external team members, I can generate a Related Items report:
As you can see, related items in Fifth Edition are quite a powerful concept. They alert team members to the existence of information related to the project files and activities they are working on, providing important insight that might otherwise go unnoticed.
The process of reviewing, marking up and processing a digital submittal has been vastly improved in 5.0 with the introduction of markup stamps and some improved workflow. Here is how it works:
1) In the example below, I receive a “digital” submittal consisting of a PDF shop drawing as an attachment to an email and select the option to file it as a New Submittal:
2) After selecting the project and option to log a new submittal, I complete the submittal information dialog and select OK:
3) Notice in the previous dialog, I could have selected the Next Action option to forward the submittal to another team member for them to review. This would allow me to assign them a “Due Back” date and track their progress. However, let’s assume I am going to review this submittal myself by going to the Submittals activity center, selecting the submittal and accessing the equipment plan PDF from the “Received” action in the History tab, as shown below:
4) After double clicking on the PDF, it opens in the Newforma Viewer. I can zoom around to review the drawing, mark it up and save all my markups as views that are then visible within the Markup Sessions activity center. Saved markup views also become bookmarks in any PDF’s you create from this markup, so it’s a good idea to save each markup to make it easy for the contractor or other team members to find them:
5) Once you have added all your comments, you can optionally add a markup stamp. Markup stamps are actually created from AutoCAD blocks using any version of AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT. Here is how you add a stamp:
6) Markup Stamps work very much like AutoCAD blocks in that you can add AutoCAD Attributes to create standard text fields within your markup stamps. And there are a series of “smart” attributes such as Project Number, Submittal ID, etc. that “auto-default” when used within certain workflows. The screen shot below demonstrates this. Since I opened the markup session from a project submittal, the current project is set, the active item defaults to the correct submittal and I am able to select the appropriate Submittal “Action” from my company’s standard drop down list of options:
7) Here is the submittal stamp after I insert it into my markup session. This is just a simple sample stamp that ships with Fifth Edition. As I mentioned above, you can change the graphics, fonts and even add your company logo or scanned signature to your markup stamps using AutoCAD:
8) To send the markup back to the contactor as a PDF response, I select the PDF toolbar button and select the option to Send PDF:
9) Again, the context of the current workflow results in the default action to send the PDF as an attachment to the submittal response:
10) I then type in my comments to the contractor and select “Create Response”:
11) Because the action was “Revise and Resubmit”, I am prompted to create an “Expected Re-submittal”. This will log the expected re-submittal, track it as an open item and notify me if the contractor’s re-submittal is coming due or late:
12) Since I chose “Via Email” as my response method, an Outlook email is composed for me with the submittal transmittal and markup attached as a PDF:
13) Before filing it to the project, I check the PDF by opening it in the Adobe Reader – This is what it will look like to the contractor:
14) Right about now, you might be thinking that the workflow I just demonstrated looks pretty slick for submittals containing just a single drawing or document. If life were only so simple! 
But what if the submittal contains multiple drawings all of which need to be reviewed and marked up as part of a consolidated response to the contractor?
In that case, instead of using Send PDF as I showed above, I would use “Create PDF” to create individual PDF files from each of my markup sessions, as shown below:
15) In doing so, I want to be sure to check the “Add to Project Item” option which ensures that no matter where I save the PDF in the project, it will be “linked” to the correct submittal as a supporting document:
16) I repeat this same process for each drawing or document in the submittal, linking each of my markup session PDF files back to the submittal as a supporting document. When I complete my submittal review process, the Supporting Documents tab of the Submittals Activity Center will display each one of these PDF markups, and I can proceed to create my submittal response:
17) And when I select the “Respond to Sender” task, the first dialog allows me to select any or all of the supporting documents to include in my response:
From here, the process is the same as before. I fill in the submittal response form, the three PDF files are attached, and I process the response with the “Revise and Resubmit” action.
Hopefully this article has given you some insight into how Newforma Project Center Fifth Edition now weaves together elements from Outlook, Submittals, Markup Sessions and Adobe Reader to streamline the digital submittal review process.
OK, so the excitement may pale in comparison to some other new product announcements on your radar screen (anyone else been waiting for the iPhone 3G?), but within the circle of Newforma Project Center users, the support for RFI in the upcoming release of Project Center might just qualify as a “highly-anticipated event”. Put another way, I think I have heard the request (plea?) for a Newforma RFI solution from just about every Architectural user of Newforma Project Center. So it’s nice to be able (finally) to talk about it as a major enhancement to the upcoming release of Newforma Project Center Fifth Edition.
The Newforma CA Module
A little bit of background before I begin: In Fifth Edition, the RFI Activity Center has been bundled together with the Submittals Activity Center as Newforma’s CA Module. Only those Project Center users that need the ability to create, modify or respond to RFI or Submittals require the CA license. Project Center users who are not licensed for CA still gain “View” access to the information in these two activity centers.
The RFI Activity Center has a lot of great features so my goal with this article is to simply provide a high level overview:
Integrated with Microsoft Outlook
These days, you probably receive most of your contractor RFI and consultant’s answers via email regardless of what software the contractor is using (Prolog, Expedition, etc.). With each of these emails, you then have to open the Excel spreadsheet containing that project’s log and/or hunt through the network or paper file system to track down supporting documentation and carry out your next action. Sound familiar?
That’s why Fifth Edition now supports logging, assigning and answering RFI all from within Microsoft Outlook. Here is how it works:
1) When you receive an RFI via email, just click the File as New RFI option in Outlook (notice there is also an option to file emails directly as RFI answers):
2) Without leaving Outlook, you can log the RFI and then optionally assign it to a consultant using the “Next action” check option:
3) When you receive an answer from a consultant via email, you can log the answer and respond to the RFI Author, again, all without leaving Outlook:
Tracking RFI inside Newforma Project Center
Your CA staff can log and assign RFI, record RFI answers and respond to RFI authors all from within the RFI Activity Center. What’s really nice is that all Project Center users, regardless of whether they participate directly in the CA workflow, can gain access and insight into its critical activities and results. Here is how it works:
1) From the RFI Activity Center, all users can view and interact with project RFIs and their related transmittals, attachments, email and supporting documents. Users who have the CA license can do much more, including log and assign new RFI, log consultant’s answers and respond to RFI Authors, as depicted below:
2) You can filter, sort and re-arrange the contents of the RFI activity center, and then output a report to Excel, Word, PDF and other formats. If you enable the option to display details in the report formatting options, the RFI receive, assign, answer and response to author transactions get grouped beneath each RFI record, as shown in the RFI report exported to Excel below:
3) And integration with Newforma Markup Sessions allows you to easily incorporate PDF sketches created using the Newforma Markup application into your RFI responses. In the example below, I marked up two areas on a CAD drawing and selected the Send PDF option, which then provides the option of sending it as a response to an open RFI:
4) The user is then guided through the process of creating the response to the contractor, as depicted in the screen capture below:
Integrated with Newforma Info Exchange
Many of our customers also asked for a way to command greater accountability from their sub-consultants during CA transactions, so both RFI and Submittals have been integrated with Newforma Info Exchange in Fifth Edition. Here is how it works:
1) When you assign an RFI to a consultant and choose the “via Info Exchange” option, the consultant will get an email notification with a link that takes them to a view of the RFI on your Info Exchange web site:
Notice that the consultant can Send a Response to this RFI directly from this screen.
2) Each time this consultant returns to your Info Exchange web site, they will be reminded of all their their outstanding RFI, file transfers, action items and submittals across all the projects they are working with you on from the My Open Items screen:
3) Additionally, contractors who log into your Info Exchange web site can directly submit RFIs or Submittals:
That’s about all I have room for here. As you can see, the RFI process touches many different areas of Newforma, including Outlook, the RFI Activity Center, Markup and Info Exchange. Hopefully this has provided a useful introduction to its many capabilities.
The new Markup Sessions Activity Center in Fifth Edition allows each Project Center user to easily browse, preview, add comments or PDF publish any Newforma markup session created on the project.
Here is how it works:
1) Start by marking up a CAD file, PDF or BIM model as part of a design or CA review workflow. In this example, I will mark up a Revit model by opening it in Revit, using Revit to find a view I want to mark up, and selecting the Newforma Snapshot tool in the Windows task bar:
2) This will prompt me to select two points to define the view of the Revit model I want to mark up:
3) After selecting the two points, the view is displayed in the Newforma Viewer and I can mark it up. After I mark it up, I go back to reviewing the Revit model. When I want to comment on another view, I select the Snapshot tool again and mark up the view. I repeat until my Revit review and markup session is complete. I will end up with a whole bunch of marked up views within the Markup Panel on the right hand side, as shown below:
3) Next, and importantly if I want it to appear in the Markup Sessions Activity Center, I will save my Markup Session. Notice I can name it, keyword tag it, add a description and also “relate” the session to another item, such as an Action item, as shown below:
4) As soon as a Markup Session is saved, it will appear in the Markup Sessions Activity Center within Project Center. Note: unlike Fourth Edition and before, you no longer need to designate a location for the markup session NMU file – Newforma stores all markup sessions centrally within the project, similarly to how it stores transmittals or action items. All internal team members can view and add comments to any project markup session, as shown below:
5) You can then publish any selection of markup sessions to PDF or create a report to communicate any comments or design decisions with the extended project team. In the example below, I am publishing the open and closed markup sessions associated with two source files:
6) The Publish dialog provides an option to combine the markup sessions into a single PDF as well as shuffle the display order:
7) The final, published PDF contains bookmarks and sub-bookmarks for each markup session and marked up view so you can send the extended team members an organized, professional-looking red line set and they don’t need Newforma Project Center to view it! Here is an example of what it looks like in Adobe Reader:
8) One last tip: The Markup Sessions Activity Center is great for reviewing drawing sets and communicating corrections and revisions to CAD/BIM designers. Designers can view markups and comments associated with any drawings they are responsible for:
9) When they want to incorporate markups as corrections in the underlying source drawing, they simply highlight the markup session, select the Related Items tab and open the source drawing in its native application, as shown below:
10) After changing the underlying source drawing, they can add some final comments and close the markup session, leaving behind a permanent audit trail of these design decisions:
Download the webinar from Newforma Info Exchange
On April 23, May 7 and June 4, 2008, we hosted a webinar to give Newforma users a look at new features in Newforma Project Center. A 75-minute recording of the June 4 webinar may be downloaded here. (It’s a big file, so you may need to wait a bit.)
The webinar covers these topics and more:
Added functionality in Newforma Info Exchange
Newforma Info Exchange has added extended means to work with your external team members, allowing the project team to transfer project information, coordinate distributed CAD or BIM datasets, streamline CA and design review workflows and gain access to a common set of project phases, tasks, milestones and meetings in a shared project calendar.
New: Sharepoint integration for Search
SharePoint® users can now search SharePoint-related project sites directly from Newforma Project Center. By selecting “SharePoint” as the search location on the Search menu, Newforma will retrieve and display results from the Sharepoint project site that contain the matching search term.
New: Project Timeline activity center
The Project Timeline activity center enables the team to track and manage important project-specific events ranging from phases, tasks and milestones to meetings, phone calls and local holidays. Importantly, you can associate events with supporting documents and related items like Action Items.
Improved Action Items
The Action Items activity center, formerly Issue Manager, has added capabilities to engage the power of the extended project team to identify and manage critical issues, helping to keep your projects on budget and on schedule.
New: RFI activity center
Now RFIs can be logged from an incoming email in Microsoft Outlook, received via Newforma Info Exchange or simply entered from the RFI activity center. You can forward the RFI to an external consultant and track the progress and due dates of all open RFI from the RFI activity center, which also tracks any related email correspondence or supporting project files and provides a searchable audit trail for each RFI in the project.
And much more!
Download the June 4 webinar from Newforma Info Exchange by clicking this link.
April 2, 2008 -
Server virtualization is a promising technology that is interesting to nearly every Newforma customer. Virtualization promises to lower cost, simplify administration, reduce space and power requirements, and simplify load balancing and backup. However, many Newforma customers have been unsatisfied with a virtual deployment of a Newforma Project Center Server. This document provides background on Newforma virtualization efforts and discusses the circumstances where a production deployment of a virtual Newforma Project Center Server may be possible. Note: because of numerous problems associated with virtual deployments in production use, Newforma does not recommend virtualization of the Newforma Project Center Server at this time.
Virtualization is a storm sweeping the landscape of information technology. Rarely has a new technology been so eagerly accepted in IT. Gartner estimates that over a half-million virtual machines are currently in use. By 2009 that number is estimated to grow to over three million machines. (Estimates are from http://www.cio.com/article/108403/Gartner_Virtualization_Is_Too_Expensive.) The press and industry ‘buzz’ is so uniformly positive on the benefits of virtualization, that few people are aware of limitations with the technology.
Virtualization is most successful when used to combine servers or applications running on hardware that isn’t fully utilized. By combining many different under-utilized physical servers into a set of virtual machines running on one physical device, IT departments can often gain significant cost savings by getting more efficient use of computer hardware.
Virtualization offers fewer advantages when used to combine fully-loaded servers, or disk intensive and network I/O intensive applications. This is because all the virtual machines still have to share one set of physical components: i.e. CPU, memory, disk, and network. The CPU and memory hardware can be scaled by purchasing multi-core servers with lots of RAM. It’s harder to scale out disk and network bandwidth, although solutions such as multiple NICs and fast disk arrays connected by fiber channel can make significant improvements. The disk or network latency imposed by the overhead of a virtual environment can significantly affect application performance. In many applications this overhead is insignificant. However, there are applications that don’t work well in a virtual environment. For example, database virtualization can work well, but only when most queries are resolved from an in-memory cache (see http://www.vmware.com/technology/virtual-infrastructure-apps/oracle.html)
The Newforma Project Center Server is an example of a resource intensive server that relies on very fast low-latency connections to the disk and network. This is the most difficult type of application to virtualize. Our experience has shown that the virtualization overhead is so large that it prohibits production use in many production environments. In addition, customers have found that virtual environments hosting Newforma Project Center Server can fail, requiring a hard restart of the physical server. This type of failure can easily corrupt the search catalogs maintained by Newforma Project Center. In this case, a rebuild of the search database is required – a step that can take many days.
To address the problem of virtualization overhead, vendors suggest purchasing high-end servers with very fast network and disk systems. In addition, experts agree that a native virtual environment (a bare metal install) is preferable to a hosted virtual environment (a virtual machine that runs on top of an operating system). The two most commonly used virtual environments are the VmWare ESX Server, which is an example of a native virtual environment and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, which is an example of a hosted virtual environment.
Today, the best virtual environment for Newforma Project Center server would consist of VmWare ESX running a virtual copy of Windows Server 2003. This would be deployed on a dual quad-core processor with enough RAM to allocate 4 Gig to the Newforma virtual server. The system would reside on a directly attached storage array with a fiber optic connection to 15k rpm SAS disks. It would also have multiple high-speed NICs. Note that a system configured like this is significantly more expensive than a dedicated NPCS server!
Case Stories
There have been many customers that have tried deploying Newforma Project Center in a virtual environment. Many have started with the free virtual environments available from either VMWare or Microsoft , and have run them on existing server hardware that often doesn’t meet the Newforma standard hardware specification. These types of deployments are doomed from the start. They invariably lead to frustration at the customer site and a rapid change to a real physical server. Rather than focus on these numerous failures, the following case stories present the more successful virtual deployments that we know of today.
Today’s success stories all share the following:
1. VmWare ESX Server
2. High-end computer hardware
3. A relatively low number of Newforma projects
4. A relatively small amount of project data to index
A large engineering firm: One of the earliest virtual deployments on high-end hardware occurred at a large engineering firm that has been a long time Newforma customer. This firm purchased an 8 core server with 16 gb of RAM and a RAID 5 disk array with 15k rpm SAS drives and used the VmWare ESX Server native virtual environment. They successfully ran a single copy of the Newforma Project Center Server in this virtual environment for several months. It was used to index about one terabyte of project data. Flush with success of running one server, they added a couple of additional virtual servers. Performance suffered and the Newforma Project Center server was unable to keep the search index current. Even worse, “lock ups” of the virtual environment occasionally required a restart of the physical server. This type of failure sometimes corrupted the Newforma search index database, requiring a rebuild of the database that took days. After months of trials, the customer replaced the Newforma virtual server with a dedicated blade server and there have been no further performance issues.
An architecture firm with a small number of projects: One of our customers deployed Newforma in a virtual environment in late 2006 using the fastest hardware they could buy at the time. It consists of a HP DL360 G5 computer containing two dual-core 3 Ghz Xeon processors and 16 gb of RAM. The server is connected to a SAN using two gigabit Ethernet connections and runs the VmWare ESX server.
This hardware runs three virtual servers:
(1) CAD server licensing and installs
(2) Main file server
(3) Newforma Project Center Server
They have allocated only one core and 4 gb of RAM to the NPC server. (Note this is lower than the Newforma recommended hardware specification.) The company has 75 users, typically half use NPC each day. They have only 30 projects, but the project data that they index is nearly 400 gb. They’ve been running NPC in a virtual environment with no issues for over a year.
An architecture firm just starting NPC use: Another successful virtual production deployment is at an architecture firm with 10-15 users and less than 40 projects. Their hardware consists of five identically configured Dell 1950s. Each has a dual quad-core 2.66 gHz processor with 32 gig of RAM. In addition, each server has 4 network connections, and is connected to a SAN via fiber channel. They are using the VMWare ESX Server.
The company has five of these computers, three are configured as ESX virtual boxes in a clustered failover environment. Two are dedicated to their production SQL server and their Exchange server.
The three virtual boxes run 36 different servers. The virtual box that is currently running NPCS is also running 4 Deltek servers, 2 application servers, print servers, SQL reporting, SQL development, Blackberry Enterprise, and a GIS application server.
The IT team noted that their virtual performance markedly improved when they started running virtual machines that were created on the SAN, rather than on the local server disk.
When fully implemented, this company expects to have 500-750 projects with about 500-600 gig of project data accessed by 150 users. Our past experience has shown that this level of use may cause performance problems in a virtual environment. We’ve asked the customer to closely watch performance as their NPC use grows.
Virtualization Options that work with Newforma
Newforma Info Exchange is a server that works well in a virtual environment. Several customers are running successfully in this mode.
A Newforma Project Center Server running on a physical server may have CPU and memory cycles that could be used for other tasks. One possible way to leverage these unused compute cycles would be to run hosted virtual machines on the server. In this mode, virtual machines exist on top of the Newforma Project Center Server operating system. These virtual machines will compete for system resources, but the overhead of running inside the virtual environment is avoided for the Newforma services. Virtual environments with non-intensive needs such as print, license, or applications servers are particularly good candidates for this type of environment.
Virtualization research and development at Newforma
The Newforma Engineering group is constantly using virtual servers for development and testing. As hardware and virtual environments improve we will continue our scalability testing and hope to be able to provide improved support for production use of Newforma Project Center Server in a virtual environment in the future.
In Fifth Edition, you can use the Timeline Activity Center to log phone calls, meeting minutes, tasks and any other project-related event. You can then display these events in a log, calendar, or dynamic journal view that can also be used to display project files or activities such as transmittals, RFI or action items by date range.
Here is how it works:
1) Start by logging the phone call or meeting event in the Project Timeline activity center as a project event. The list of event types you see below is customizable by your company:
2) After adding a client meeting I am prompted to enter the details. Importantly, the Project Timeline is well integrated with MS-Outlook. You can drag meetings from an Outlook calendar or drag phone call entries from an Outlook Journal right into the Project Timeline. And if you have Outlook 2007, you can subscribe to the project timeline to view it from within Outlook:
3) To keep certain Timeline views from getting cluttered, you can control what types of events get displayed where within the Project Timeline. For example, the Client Meeting I just added now appears in the Calendar view shown below:
Since each team member may log several phone calls a day, phone calls by default do not show in the Calendar view above.
4) To view my phone calls, I can switch to the Event Log view, which shows all the Timeline project events in a list that I can quickly sort or filter to find what I am looking for. Importantly, as with other items in Newforma Project Center, you can add comments and links to supporting documents or related items to Timeline events:
5) In the example below, the Meeting Minutes Word document was attached as a Supporting Document and action items coming out of the meeting were identified as related info:
6) Best of all, if you then go look at the Journal view, you can instantly generate a chronological listing of ALL activities in the project by selecting any range of dates, weeks, months, quarters or years:
The Journal displays any project activity that occurred within the specified period, including project files saved during the period, filed email that were sent during period, action items, RFI or Submittals that were created or closed during the period, transmittals that were sent during the period, meetings, phone calls, etc…
7) You can filter activities by Type or Team Member to further refine your results. For example, if you want to make sure that your markups related to a recent RFI response had been incorporated into the source CAD files, you could filter to display only Markup Sessions, RFI and AutoCAD drawing activity during the period in question, as shown below:
In Fifth Edition, “internal” Newforma Project Center users and “external” Info Exchange users can easily share, revise and coordinate their referenced CAD or BIM drawing sets using Info Exchange Folders.
Here is how it works:
1) An Info Exchange Folder is created in Newforma Project Center by an “internal” project team member. Simply select the project folder or document set, right click and select the “Publish as New Info Exchange Folder” task:
2) You’ll be asked to identify recipients – these are the individual project team members you want to notify and provide with access to the published Info Exchange folder. You also need to specify whether external members are allowed to upload files to the Info Exchange Folder. You can add additional recipients after the folder is initially published, so its not too important to construct a comprehensive list of recipients at the outset:
3) Just like Info Exchange file transfers in Fourth Edition, you can easily restrict access and schedule the published folders to be automatically removed from the Info Exchange site after a pre-determined period. So much easier than FTP!
4) Each recipient will get a notification with links to simply download the contents of the shared folder or to login to view the Info Exchange Folder contents first:
5) If they select the link to login to the Info Exchange site, they can choose to only download selected files and also upload their own files. Any time they log into your Info Exchange site, they will be able to quickly view and upload to any Info Exchange Folders that they are a party to:
6) When external members upload files to the Info Exchange Folder, you receive an email notification with a link to the pending Info Exchange Folder Upload inside Newforma Project Center. From here you can receive the pending upload: